Private Richard Murray was bayoneted to death and his body tossed in a bomb crater in May 1945 by Japanese forces who had found the stolen rice hidden under a hut.
Private Richard Murray,22nd Brigade Headquarters.AWM
Murray and three other soldiers had committed the theft in an attempt to facilitate an escape from a death march in Borneo,in which captured soldiers were forced to walk from Sandakan to Ranau,resulting in the deaths of 2,434 Allied prisoners of war.
But when confronted by the Japanese,who threatened to execute 30 soldiers unless those responsible came forward,Murray took the sole blame.
Murray was given a terrible beating,tied to a tree and an hour later fellow soldier Private Keith Botterill observed him being moved at bayonet point along a track towards an old POW cemetery,where he was killed.
The award given to Murray is in no small part due to historian Lynette Silver,who pursued his case for a gallantry medal even after a military tribunal had initially rejected it.
Lynette Silver at the Australian War Memorial.Penny Bradfield
Silver was recently awarded an MBE for her work as a military historian,written an authoritive history of the Sandakan death marches and helped discover numerous graves.
She is currently travelling with14 POW relatives to Borneo and will be at Ranau,where Murray was executed,on Remembrance Day and told theHeraldas she departed that she was delighted by the outcome.
She said the successful outcome had taken “years and years and years.”
The four survivors from Japanese POW camp in Borneo:Nelson Short (left),Bill Sticpewich,Keith Botterill and Bill Moxham just before they were evacuated from Ranua.“Sandakan:A conspiracy of silence” by Lynette Silver.
“I am ecstatic,it has been 10 years at least. He was the only person[in Sandakan] to voluntarily give up his life. Everyone else died because the Japanese starved them to death,shot them or bayoneted them.
“By taking the blame he saved Botterill’s life and in the end Botterill became one of only six who survived this whole awful holocaust and one of only two who could give information about what happened to the War Crimes Tribunal.
“I was thrilled to receive the MBE but I am more pleased about Murray,and to know that he finally has the recognition he deserves.”